[Continued from page 340.]
FIFTH DECADE.
1841
William Henry Harrison died April 4, one month after his inauguration as President of the United States, and John Tyler, the Vice-President, succeeded him. Harrison's Cabinet, excepting Daniel Webster, resigned soon after Tyler assumed office, owing to his veto of measures by which the Whigs tried to revive the National Bank. Seminole War, the most protracted and costly of all Indian wars, ended after an expenditure of ten million dollars. University of Michigan founded. Brook Farm communistic experiment begun.
The "opium war" between Great Britain and China continued during intervals separated by periods of negotiation. The British took Hong-Kong, silenced the Bogue forts, destroyed a Chinese flotilla at Canton, took that city, exacted six million dollars' indemnity from local authorities, and forced the reopening of trade there. British fleet, convoying troops and moving northward, captured successively Amoy, Chusan, Chinhai, and Wingpo. In Afghanistan (November 2), British residents and followers at Kabul were massacred, and British troops outside the city were driven off and forced to retreat toward Jelalabad.
Richard Cobden came into prominence in the British Parliament as a free trader, and the struggle over the Corn Laws began. Lord Melbourne's ministry resigned after an unsuccessful appeal to the country, and Sir Robert Peel formed a new cabinet. Punch, the humorous weekly, founded. Sir David Wilkie, English artist; Sir Astley Cooper, English surgeon; and Theodore Hook, English humorist, died.
POPULATION—Washington, D.C., 23,364; New York (including boroughs now forming Greater New York), 391,114; New York (Manhattan), 312,710; London (Metropolitan District, census 1841), 1,873,676; London (old city), 125,009; United States, 17,017,723; Great Britain and Ireland (census 1841), 27,019,558.
RULERS—The same as in the previous year, except that William Henry Harrison became President of the United States, and was succeeded in April by John Tyler.
1842
Maine boundary question settled by a treaty negotiated by Daniel Webster for the United States and Lord Ashburton for Great Britain. Congress resisted a threatened invasion by the French of the Hawaiian Islands. Dorr's "rebellion" in Rhode Island, by which T.W. Dorr, "free suffragist," tried to get governorship, to which S.W. King had been elected under the old charter.